The Discussion

I think what's cool about Larry is that he's excited to see his videos being posted up here at Channel 9 and isn't afraid to admit it. So many people would be "too cool for school", but he's posting to his blog as each video is posted. I love that. Larry,
you rule.

The toughest thing I can remember doing was getting a Commodore 64, and AIM 65 Data monitoring bit of kit and a Modem and a Voice synth connected to a Battery backup and the phone. With all manner of weather monitoring stuff and power line monitoring sensors
so we could create something we called Weather Voice. Back in 1985.

The tricks were getting serial communications to occur between the aim and the C64 on the modem. But we needed to leave enough of the modem intact to allow it to sense a ring and pick up the phone. Then we had to impose the Voice synth output onto the phone
line via a hand wound transformer (8 ohm to 300 ohm if I recall correctly)

I remembered I hand crafted the rom firmware in in a cartridge that we wire wrapped together to read the AIMs data and craft a weather report. You could call the thing from anywhere and get the weather up to the minute. BP, Rainfall, Wind Speed and direction,
We even had cloud cover sensors with trends. It was pretty cool. Of course I farged the wire wrap job and forgot to reverse the pin connections initially. So I just bent all the firmware roms pins up 180 degrees and inserted the chip into the socket upside
down and mirrored. Worked like a charm.

I can say that Database apps in .NET are a hell of alot easier now.

I'll bet Larry has seen some seriously kludged stuff like that as well...